Retiree Christina Maier moved from Portland five years ago to Tollgate, a subdivision two miles west of Sisters surrounded by the Deschutes National Forest. She quickly set to work helping her community improve its wildfire resiliency, starting with her own home.
Nearly two years ago, it became the first home in Oregon to receive a Wildfire Prepared Home designation by the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety. She has also made fire risk assessments on 175 properties in Tollgate and won a state grant to remove diseased ponderosa pines and conduct other forest thinning work.
Maier is now receiving national recognition for her wildfire resiliency efforts. Last week, she was named one of 10 finalists in the national Neighbor of the Year contest sponsored by Neighbors Bank, which will award $20,000 to the winner.
Maier was nominated by Kellen Klein, executive director of Sisters nonprofit Citizens4Community. (Klein was interviewed on “Think Out Loud” last September to talk about community-building efforts and recovery from the Flat Fire.)
Maier joins us to discuss her nomination and efforts to help her neighbors.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Christina Maier spent about 30 years in the Portland area and then moved to a neighborhood outside of Sisters on the edge of the Deschutes National Forest. She quickly set to work helping her community improve its wildfire resiliency, starting with her own home. Now she’s receiving attention for her efforts. She was just named one of the 10 finalists in the national Neighbor of the Year contest, sponsored by Neighbors Bank.
She joins us to talk about this honor and her continuing efforts to help the people around her. Christina, congratulations and welcome to the show.
Christina Maier: Thanks for the opportunity. Glad to be here.
Miller: What brought you to this Tollgate neighborhood outside of Sisters after spending about 30 years in the Portland area?
Maier: Well, we first moved to Central Oregon and wound up in a more of a juniper-oriented neighborhood that worked for a while. And then we decided to sell our house and go camping for a couple of years. And then just around the pandemic, we thought, “This doesn’t feel good, we better have a home base again.” So we were camping out under the trees near Sisters for a couple of months and grew to really love it. We bicycled around looking for places to land permanently, and discovered Tollgate, which is two miles west of Sisters, very much in the dense ponderosa forest. It’s an older community that has 440 lots, many cul-de-sacs that are all intertwined. It was just a beautiful area. You could bike right from your front door and get to town if you wanted or go out in the forest.
But at the same time, it also created a little bit of unrest, because now you’re under the trees, there’s all these needles falling all the time. And then the fires that happened on the other side of the mountain range, the Labor Day fires started up. And it just made me a little bit more concerned.
Miller: Was there a specific wake-up call for you?
Maier: Smoke, and pine needles. I think it must have been the Labor Day fires of 2020 generated so much dark smoke in the Sisters area that we were all stuck inside for two to three weeks. And it was really concerning.
Miller: A few years ago, you decided then to seek a Wildfire Prepared Home certificate from the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety. And you succeeded, becoming the first home in Oregon with that designation. What did you have to do to get that?
Maier: Well, we were lucky. We were in the middle of building a new house, that would be 2021, and we were able to select the materials that we felt were safest. So fiber cement siding, class A asphalt roof. We decided on concrete porches rather than decks, triple glazed windows, and things like that. So we built the house from the start with wildfire concerns in mind.
And then I learned about the IBHS program during a presentation I was at for Firewise leaders. I called the guy from California. He had said they had just started up a program in Oregon, so I just leveraged that information and applied for it. It was not difficult, if it’s new construction.
Miller: New construction, both up to current code, but it seems like you actually went beyond what’s required by the state.
Maier: Probably so, yeah. And at that time, there were no requirements for wildfire resilience or home hardening issues for new construction. Now there are areas of the state that are implementing some requirements.
Miller: Has that led to a reduction in your homeowner’s insurance?
Maier: No, but it will starting in November, I’m excited to say. I’ve been working with our insurance agent for three years now, calling every year, saying that I have this certification, is it gonna count for anything this year? And he’ll say no. And this year, he said they’re announcing, I think in October, that they’ll start providing a discount to Firewise neighborhoods, and on top of that, to properties that specifically have the IBHS wildfire home certification. So, I’m really excited that we’ve made some inroads into that in Oregon. California now routinely honors that certification, and I believe Colorado.
Miller: Do you have any sense for how much of a discount you might get?
Maier: No, I don’t at all. It actually doesn’t matter to me, it’s more the principle of it, the fact that it’s important to be acknowledged for the work that you’ve done. And I think that will come. But I think it’s a great first step.
Miller: So that’s your own home. When did you start becoming a kind of organizer of Firewise, or more broadly, wildfire resiliency advocate and information spreader?
Maier: I started to get involved with fire resilience and our neighborhood Firewise group back in 2022 and was offered an opportunity to become an assessor. They were starting up a program where residents in Tollgate could take part of a training program and become certified assessors, where we would voluntarily inspect a resident’s exterior of the home. I also volunteered to be the scheduler for that. So we started that up. Myself and a group of maybe 10 other folks learned to be assessors. We would be invited to a person’s property and give them advice about how to make their property safer. And it was purely voluntary, there was no requirement. So it was a great way also to meet our neighbors, especially being new to the neighborhood.
And I really enjoyed that, and then became more and more involved with the Firewise group, and had an opportunity to become chair a couple of years later. And my education background and fear of fire really kicked in and seemed to be a good way for me to spend my time productively as a retiree.
Miller: You mentioned 440 lots in the Tollgate neighborhood. How many homes have you now visited to assess for wildfire resilience?
Maier: [At least] 175, and probably another 50, not so much a fire risk assessment, but we’ve offered folks the ability to have one-eighth inch screens inserted into their foundation vents. So that was the only thing we were offering, just to be able to do that for them free of charge. And that also allowed me to have a conversation with that homeowner and do something for them, at the same time, provide maybe a few minor strategies that they could do. As long as we were on the property walking around the house, it was just a way of relationship building and awareness of small things that they could do. And that seemed to be a really great entree, also meeting my neighbors again, which I really loved.
Miller: Once you add that 50 other homes to the 175, that’s more than half of the entire development. It’s a very impressive number. What’s driving you?
Maier: Oh, fear. Being able to sleep at night. That’s a lot of it. But also, I can see the difference. When I drive through and walk through every day, I see people doing the work. It’s taken a little bit of time. But I do realize sometimes it’s expensive, it’s time-consuming, it’s not the top of people’s list. But I think you can really see a very visible difference in Tollgate. And then as I see other neighborhoods within the Sisters country become Firewise oriented, or be part of that network … We have 33 Firewise neighborhoods in the Sisters area, which is huge. All of Deschutes County has, I think, 120. And I believe Deschutes County is one of the highest numbers in the whole country of Firewise communities. So you can just feel the momentum building.
Miller: Do you think that most of those have happened post-2020, post the Labor Day fires and other fires that have happened since then in the area?
Maier: A hundred percent, yeah. Since 2020, the Sisters area has had four big fires, most recently the Akawa Butte Fire, the year before that was Flat Fire. Two years before that was the Grandview Fire, and then back in 2020, we also had our own Green Ridge Fire. So it’s a big deal. We all kind of hold our breath all summer and wait till October, November when the rain hopefully comes. So it’s not just me. Everyone’s very tuned into it, and starting to really do something about it, which is exciting.
Miller: Has doing something about it alleviated any of the fear that you said has been driving your work? In other words, can you sleep better at night now after doing this work?
Maier: I really can, most of the time. The other thing that’s been really important to me is getting to meet our emergency professionals. Our fire department, I know those guys. I know our ranger district in the Deschutes National Forest, I know a lot of those folks. I know our county forester. I know the other emergency folks for Deschutes County. And the fact that the Redmond Air Center is right in Redmond, we are so well positioned to survive a wildfire. The only thing we can’t really change is nature, wind and human carelessness, I guess. But I think we have all the tools in place, and it has been very soothing to understand how much incredible talent we have in Central Oregon, in Sisters, and how many volunteers are willing to pitch in all the time. No matter what you need, they’re ready to solve that problem.
So it’s a great place to live, and to feel like this is worth spending hours and hours and hours trying to hope that this place survives a disaster. I think we can learn from California, from the Colorado fires, and take those learnings and hopefully avoid the situations that those other areas have been faced with because we can prepare ahead of time.
Miller: What does being a good neighbor mean to you?
Maier: I think it’s noticing what your community needs, and figuring out what you can do about it, whether it’s the person next door or down the road or across town, and then trying to find a way of bringing these people together to help each other out. Cause there are a lot of resources, a lot of opportunities to make a difference every day.
Miller: If you do win this Neighbor of the Year award – again, you’re one of the finalists – do you have any ideas what you would do with the $20,000 prize?
Maier: Well, I have so many different ideas and they change every day. I’m trying not to count my eggs before they’re hatched, but I’m a person who has ideas all day long. So stay tuned.
Miller: Fingers crossed Christina Maier. Congratulations already and it was a pleasure talking with you.
Maier: Thank you.
Miller: That’s Christina Maier, she lives outside of Sisters. She was just named one of 10 finalists in the national Neighbor of the Year contest.
“Think Out Loud®” broadcasts live at noon every day and rebroadcasts at 8 p.m.
If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983.
